How Operational Thinking benefit you?_#Fulbrightlearning

Operational Thinking helps you to see the bigger picture.

To understand how Operational Thinking can help your life, think about the following question:

Question I: What should a farmer do when he sees that the bugs are harming his rice field?

Here is the simple solution for that:

Question II: What happens when there is a "Bees 🐝" in the system? Watch this 2 mins video from VOA to find out: 

Question III: Answer the following questions:

(1) What's going on in the field?
(2) The second system when the bee is present, how is it different from the first, and what can you learn from this example?

My Answer: https://bit.ly/2RJZ5VC 

Humans are easy to think linearly. For example, to achieve a result, we need to do a certain action with little thought about the consequences of that action. Life is a complex system that includes many things that interact with each other and Operational Thinking helps you to see broader, better understand and discover the hidden factor affect your result.

How to use Operational Thinking as a tool for thinking?

In a dense forest, there was a Fox and a Bird. To understand the forest, the fox ran very fast, searching tree after tree in the forest, and the bird looked at the forest from above to see the whole jungle. The fox is also a representation of linear thinking and the bird represents system thinking.

Each animal has strengths and weaknesses:

🦊: Good at analyzing and able to understand something very detailed but easy to get lost in the forest

🐦: Has an overview, but forgetful and not good at details.

The fox should befriend the bird to get to know the forest. And so that when we thinking about how things work we should use system and analyze thinking together.

3 Easy Steps to know how things work:

(1) Be 🐦When approaching an issue, avoid thinking too detailed, but should step back and look at the problem in general, what are the factors that the problem has?

(2) Be 🦊 Analyze the characteristics of those factors, as well as how those factors are related?

(3) Draw 🗺️ Show all those correlations on the map to capture the system's operations. You can draw it on paper or use this free online software: Loopy

Conclude

Quesion: Question: Give an example where this thinking tool could 
benefit your life?

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Optional reading:

Actually the knowledge is great, but I still feel very bad for the bees at the beginning of the post. 😢 Here is some additional information about how pesticides affect natural systems, the bad news is: Birds die too!

(1) In Vietnam, pesticides using Neonicotinoids are the main ingredients still licensed for use in farming. Example: "Thuốc trừ sâu

Brimgold 200WP" (More research is needed)

(2) '75% of honey has trace amounts of the pesticide - BBC

(2) How Neonics Affect Birds (2 mins video)

(3) Bird Declines Linked to Popular Pesticides (Neonicotinoids) from Nationalgeographic.com

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#Fulbrightlearning A series of articles sharing the knowledge that I have learned at Fulbright University.

Here is one of the series about operational thinking, you can see more articles by clicking on the image below: